| art.description.project | Prior Art Automaton (Installation) was made
by the creative collective STUDIO ALIGHT,
which consists of Samantha Hookway, Fredrik
Garneij and Christofer Kanljung. The
installation was a physical embodiment of
the Studio’s previous work on paper
exhibited in the Dutch Pavilion of the 2018
Venice Architecture Biennale and at the V&A
during the London Design Festival under the
project The Institute of Patent Infringement
by Jane Chew and Matthew Stewart.
Chew and Stewart described the Call for
Entry of their collective project displayed
in 2018 as:
“The dubious world of intellectual property
rights allows “Big Tech” multinationals to
create a monopoly on ideas concerning
automation. Focusing on the political dimension
of labor, the Institute of Patent Infringement
encourages architects [and designers] to
appropriate the frameworks under which these
multinationals operate, and subvert their patent
drawings, revealing a possible radical and
emancipatory potential inherent in these
technological regimes, as well as a space where
architecture [and design] can play a role.”
And hence, this work, Prior Art Automaton
(Installation) brings the drawing exhibited
within Chew and Stewart’s context into the
context of Sweden (and even Gothenburg, and
even the neighborhood surrounding ICIA
Konsthall, Ringön). The work is described
via the studio’s website as:
”The work questions the fundamental principles
around corporate utilization of intellectual
property...In most systems of patent law, Prior
art is constituted by all information that has
been made available to the public in any form
before a given date that might be relevant to a
patent’s claim of originality. An automaton is a
self-operating machine designed to automatically
follow a predetermined sequence of operations,
or respond to predetermined instructions. For
the Prior Art Automaton work, Studio Alight have
used Artificial Intelligence and has designed a
machine that prints, and thus, creates novelty,
prior art, at a pace unachievable by humans. This protects smaller companies or individuals
because they no longer need to compete with
large global corporations in the system, a
competition that would normally be experienced
as that of David and Goliath.”
As stated above, Prior Art within the Patent
System is a very important and first step in
the patenting process.
To put it simply, Prior Art Automaton is a
sculptural installation consisting of an
automaton printing novelty, and this printed
output is created by a neural network
trained by a body of patent texts to write
new novel texts. Within the installation
there is also a directional speaker that
reads the novelty out loud while you stand
at the stream of prior arts. The voice made
from another neural network trained with
deep-learning techniques, such as the voice
of Amazon Polly and etc.
The Automaton has basically learned the
patterns of how patent language is written
by the patent system’s practitioners
(because it was trained on this system’s
output) and with this training it spits out
new language. It does this faster than any
of us humans could ever do. This notion is
expanded by the accompanying Rob Law
exhibition text created by ICIA Konsthall:
The automaton takes away the possibility to have
patents that can be used in infringement. The
availability of this prior art protects smaller
companies or individuals because they no longer
need to compete with large global corporations
in the system, a competition that would normally
be experienced as that of David and Goliath.
This is the end of patents as we know it.
Now, that last statement – it is rather
bold. Yet, even so, this work is bringing up
the concern that is bubbling up in our world
where things are shifting into being made by
machines, machines with “minds” of some
sort. And we humans must reflect on how we train those machines and the ethics around
these machines doing the job that has
historically always been inherently human.
Questions come up such as: Who owns these
machines? Who interprets them? What type of
ethics committee is needed to regulate the
fairness of its invention? Who is now the
higher – often more educated – class? And
etc.
The installation is both an archive of the
work the automaton has written, an
experience of an industrialization of a
world where novelty is invented by the
machines and the human is displaced to the
role of the paper filler (and possibly the
reader of philosophy in-between those
moments of refill in my utopia).
After exhibiting this autumn at the ICIA,
[Self] Confidence is finding new exhibition
formats and locations. Studio Alight is
currently working with leads of showing this
work in further audiences, for example at
upcoming Vitalis this May, and even within a
national courthouse in Helsingborg.
Amazon Web Services. (2019). Amazon Polly – Text to Speech
in 47 Voices and 24 Languages | Amazon Web Services.
[online] Available at:
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/polly-text-to-speech-in-
47-voices-and-24-languages/ [Accessed 5 Dec. 2019].
En.wikipedia.org. (2019). Automaton. [online] Available
at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automaton [Accessed 5
Dec. 2019].
En.wikipedia.org. (2019). Prior Art. [online] Available
at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_art
[Accessed 5 Dec. 2019]. | sv |
